BROOKLYN — Medical care for working people, and the jobs of the workers who provide it are under attack in Brooklyn, as elsewhere. The good news is that workers are fighting back against layoffs, cutbacks and hospital closings.
At Downstate Medical Center, part of the State University of New York, workers are now suffering layoffs in every department, even as the state spends tens of millions on an outside consultant, PITT Management, hired to orchestrate the layoffs. Despite the construction of two big new buildings, the administration claims there’s no money!
No money for workers’ health, that is. In an area that’s heavily populated by Black and Latin working-class families, where racist cops have killed young Black workers including Shantel Davis and Kiki Gray, and where more, not less, health care is needed, Governor Andrew Cuomo has cut funds for this safety-net hospital. Long Island College Hospital has been closed. Interfaith and Brookdale workers are fighting to stop closings.
Inside the remaining hospitals, conditions are deteriorating due to the layoffs. The cleaning department is so depleted that workers are exhausting themselves with mandated overtime. Other workers have also been loaded with more work, including nurses. Large areas of maintenance have been contracted out. And yet, despite having three unions, the only advice these bosses give workers is to keep their heads down and hope that lawyers can get them reinstated! The unions hide the number of layoffs and collaborate openly with the bosses to keep us pacified.
But workers and neighborhood residents are far from pacified. In the past, we organized protests outside of the hospital with many community members joining hospital workers against layoffs and the closing of the hospital. That’s the spirit of struggle that we need to re-awaken now to stop the racist layoffs. The bosses use us as pawns for profit; only a communist system can take us out of the chaos of the capitalist system. And only the working class, united and led by its communist party, PLP, can win that future for our class.

DILLEY, TEXAS, May 21 — On May 8, a federal judge in Texas refused to protect hunger-striking immigrant mothers from retaliation by jail guards at Karnes County Residential Center. Strike leaders had been placed in isolation, fired from jail jobs and accused of insurrection.
The 78 women on hunger strike are leading the fight for freedom by thousands of immigrant women and children who have crossed into the U.S. since last summer. Obama’s sexist and racist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) lawyers claim that the women pose a significant “threat to U.S. national security” by their mass migration. Therefore all were held initially without bail.
 In support of the women’s release, 1,000 marched on the new jail here. PLP led the strikers with anti-racist and anti-capitalist chants, but the strikers were sometimes misled by others chanting to improve U.S. democracy. Nevertheless, dozens protested yesterday at the ICE office to deliver petitions demanding freedom for all jailed women and youth. Liberal church groups call the mass incarceration of women and kids an immoral act by the U.S. government.  Civil rights lawyers in the federal court action argued without success that the women’s hunger strike was an exercise of free speech.
PL members and friends attended the court hearings and worked to support the strikers.  But no reform group leaders are willing to identify the real cause of the problem — U.S. imperialism’s fight to maintain the profits of the ruling class worldwide. Racist and sexist prison guards are only one symptom of U.S. imperialism.
Mass Incarceration for Profit
The mass incarceration of Latin women and youth in Texas is part of the mass refugee crisis affecting 50 million people around the world.  U.S. drone attacks force millions to flee their homes in Syria, Yemen, and other countries. City police from Ferguson to Baltimore incarcerate millions. In almost every case, the underlying cause of the displacement, incarceration or murder of millions of working class people is the fight to defend or expand markets and resources by the United States.  The U.S. bosses will stop at nothing to maintain dominance.
Legalistic fights for “asylum” and inmate “free speech” for women fleeing U.S.-funded oppression in their original countries are well-meaning dead ends.  The U.S. government doesn’t readily grant asylum to people fleeing U.S.-backed fascist regimes. Nor will it allow hunger strikers to shut down prisons under court-ordered First Amendment free speech doctrines.
Striking women must expand their fight. We should not physically weakening our forces through a hunger strike, which runs on the incorrect assumption that our oppressors will be pressured or moved to act by witnessing our suffering. As the 2,000 rebelling immigrant prisoners in the Willisey, TX prison demonstrated earlier this year, physical destruction of prison facilities and attacks on guards by inmates are an even more serious threat to the U.S. fascist immigration system. When prisoners strike at once, with strikes in solidarity by industrial workers who can shut off profits to the ruling class, the system will be more seriously threatened.
But in this period of capitalist crisis caused by long-term decline, bosses have little ability to reform the system, even temporarily. When the working class in Baltimore rebelled last month with violent attacks on the cops, Obama panicked, calling the Black youth of Baltimore “thugs.” Obama, Baltimore’s Black mayor, and the new U.S Attorney General then followed the ruling-class script by mobilizing cops, troops, and sell-out community programs. The rulers brought a few charges against Baltimore cops and declared the crisis over. In fact, the rulers can recover quickly from any crisis short of working-class revolution to destroy the capitalist system once and for all.  
Liberal Pols: Capitalist Flunkies
No demands for reform can fix the problems created by capitalism. A few racist cops do not cause the mass incarceration of Black and Latin workers.  Likewise, the mass deportation of families is not the byproduct of a “broken” immigration system. These are the products of U.S. imperialism in a period of decline.  This system, actually controlled by bank owners and corporations through their money and their military, depends on racist super-exploitation to survive. To foster the illusion that reform is possible, the capitalists use the media to spread the illusion that elected politicians control the system.  Thus, liberals proclaim that voting is key to reform.  But Democrat and Republican flunkies all take their orders from the capitalist class.
In this period of impending imperialist war, the electoral circus will serve only to revive faith in reform and get people ready to fight on the side of their country. History has shown that reforms are always taken away and that world war is inevitable.  Don’t be suckered. The only solution is to fight for communist revolution based on multi-racial unity of the working-class of the entire world!

What an image of the misery of the world’s working class under the rule of imperialism: the unseaworthy boat abandoned or sinking, with thousands of migrating workers left to starve or drown, and hundreds of thousands lined up to follow them.
The boat pictured above was in the Mediterranean Sea, where African and Middle Eastern workers seek in Europe work and refuge from war and famine.  It could also be in the Andaman Sea, where workers flee Myanmar and Bangladesh for work in Malaysia or Indonesia. And earlier, it could have been in the Caribbean Sea, where starving workers sailed in rickety boats from Haiti to find work in Florida.
Even Basic Necessities Impossible Under Capitalism
This year alone, 25,000 have crossed the Andaman Sea from Myanmar and Bangladesh. In the Mediterranean, that “moat” protecting the European castle, 170,000 migrants were rescued from the sea in 2014, and nearly 500 have already drowned in the first quarter of 2015. Meanwhile, Malaysia has found 28 illegal trafficking camps where the workers were brutally managed like caged animals. Mass graves were also found in these sites. The cruelty of labor migration shows the reality of capitalist terror against the working class.
As of May 27, Indonesia and Malaysia have reluctantly agreed to take in up to 7,000 migrants for up to a year. Thousands are now being held detention centers and camps. The workers from Bangladesh who are considered “economic migrants” will be deported back to Bangladesh, where their punishment for trying to flee poverty awaits them. Prime Minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina degraded those seeking to flee the country as “mentally sick” and blasted them for “tainting the country’s image in the international arena,” declaring they “should be punished.” The Rohingya migrants from Myanmar are considered to be seeking asylum and may be settled in a different country.
While the capitalists were busy with their war plans (see editorial, page 2), it was the working class who stepped up to help the migrants at sea. Workers in an Indonesian village provided food and water to hundreds of migrants. “We treated them like family,” said one villager.
Communists work for the day when workers throw off their chains and win power, knowing their duty is to make a civilization which outlaws forever capitalist exploitation and all its cruelties. Those migrating workers now abandoned to the sea are the very ones who will become the gravediggers of imperialism.
Workers migrate at such peril to their lives from their original countries, devastated by imperialism, knowing what racism and repression await them at their destinations. Ultimately, labor migration profits the capitalists, who welcome the surplus of labor to keep racist wages driven down. For the bosses, the migrant families dead at sea or at camps are just “business as usual.”
Migrant Workers: Potential Revolutionary Force
The international working class refuses to accept a world where murder of Black and brown workers is the order of the day. Communists believe that these migrating workers are a key element in abolishing capitalism and that we have a duty to unite them with the workers they leave behind and the workers they find in the new places — to build on them as a base for a newly conscious internationalism among all workers. They are not mere victims but workers who, if they become politically conscious, hold in their own two hands the key to ending not only their own misery but every worker’s who is exploited by global capital. PLP’s  attitude is that labor migration is a seed of international working-class revolution.
These migrant workers have a deep knowledge of the capitalist system from their own experience, and possess deep pride in their own collective power to endure and survive. The militancy and determination they bring with them to the workers they join in their destination countries, and the knowledge they send back with their remittances to those they left behind, is our key to seizing power.
Someday, this reservoir of knowledge and passion in the hearts of migrating workers will flow into the communist philosophy of armed revolution. Our communist Party will grows to become capable of remaking the world in our image. Then we will have the answer in blood and fire to the atrocities we see today. Every new migrant’s death impels us to continue the international fight for workers’ power. PLP in every region, from Pakistan to Los Angeles to Colombia, should organize solidarity actions with workers in Southeast Asia.

This article continues our account of PLP’s 50-year history. The Party’s concentration among industrial workers, a basic principle in building a communist movement, has helped PLP grow to our current presence in 27 countries on five continents.

In 1970, more than 400,000 workers struck General Motors (then the biggest employer in the U.S.) for 67 days to win a big raise and the 30-and-out retirement pension plan.
Three years later, with watershed contract negotiations looming between the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the Big Three automakers (GM, Ford, and Chrysler), thousands of young, conscious, militant Black workers were an emerging force. The auto bosses had hired about 10,000 Black workers as a direct result of the 1967 Black-led rebellions in Detroit and Newark against racist police brutality and for jobs. Many were Vietnam veterans who had rebelled in 1967 and again in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) and the PLP-led Workers Action Movement (WAM) were gaining strength and credibility by challenging the racism of the UAW leadership and the auto bosses.
PLP was organizing in factories in New Jersey, Detroit, Cleveland and California. In one New Jersey Ford plant, the Party and a Black caucus staged a week-long wildcat strike to stop Ford from using massive overtime to build a stockpile and undermine a possible strike. In the Cleveland Ford plant, we established the first six-hour day committee. Had it been enacted, a six-hour day would have created thousands of new jobs by adding an extra shift.
In Detroit, at Chrysler’s Mack Avenue stamping plant, we were waging an anti-racist health and safety struggle, demanding fans where temperatures routinely soared above 100 degrees. (For workers, the bosses couldn’t find any fans. But when they later replaced workers with robots, they found money for air conditioning.) It was during this struggle, in August 1973, that a PLP member was fired.
Meanwhile, at Huber Foundry, Chrysler workers walked out over a racist incident involving a supervisor. At Jefferson Assembly, a racist foreman called a Black worker the n-word. The worker climbed to the top of the plant and shut off the power. The other workers carried him out on their shoulders and the foreman was fired.
Historic Occupation
At Mack Avenue, our fired member snuck back into the plant and on the line. When Chrysler security tried to remove him, they were beaten back by 350 workers who seized the factory. It was the first plant occupation in the U.S. in more than three decades, since the communist-led Great Flint Sit-Down Strike established the UAW in 1937.
As the Mack Avenue workers secured the plant, the PLP organized support from around the city and surrounding community. Picket lines ringed the plant while workers passed bags of groceries to those inside.  The following day, with the Chrysler security guards routed, the bosses called on the cops—the capitalists’ shock troops in class struggle—to evict the strikers. But the 350 workers surged down to the ground floor and met the police with their fists in the air, chanting, “FIGHT BACK!  FIGHT BACK!” The cops retreated, no doubt under orders from Chrysler not to destroy the factory.
A detachment of PLP workers and supporters went to UAW Local 212 offices to demand union backing for the strike. When the local president refused, a scuffle erupted. By the time it was over, his glass desk was in little pieces and many union hacks were injured. Then the UAW revealed its pro-boss colors by organizing a thousand thugs from four states to physically retake the plant for Chrysler. Some were known Klansmen; others were newly elected or appointed Black officials. The strikers’ number had dwindled to about 50, too few to repel the UAW hacks and their baseball bats. The fired white comrade and a Black worker who gave crucial leadership to the action were arrested, both charged with felonious assault.
Workers Back PLP
PLP turned to workers and students to wage a political defense in the factories, at Wayne State University, and in unemployment and welfare offices. Many supporters attended the subsequent trial, and many more gave money. The Black worker who was arrested, a Vietnam vet, joined the Party the day he was called to testify. The charges were dropped when the prosecutor was unable to produce a single Chrysler production worker to testify. Not one.
When the plant reopened, UAW officials walked up and down the line with Chrysler bosses, fingering workers who had participated. About 35 were fired on the spot. Most eventually won their jobs back, but our comrades were blackballed from the industry. The UAW and the auto bosses then tried to purge PLP from the auto industry and the union.
From that point on, the UAW functioned as an overt arm of the auto bosses. Six years after the Mack Avenue action, the union entered an agreement with President Jimmy Carter and Chrysler boss Lee Iacocca to bail out the company, closing many plants and wiping out thousands of jobs. The UAW played a similar anti-worker role in 2008, when it accepted Obama’s “restructuring” of the industry after the 2007 economic crisis, which closed dozens of more plants and cut starting pay in half.
PLP’s leadership and the militancy displayed by auto workers — and especially Black workers — reinforced the Party’s concept that the industrial working class can become the heart of a communist revolution.

**

Bosses Gear Up for Next Attack on Auto Workers

2015 is a contract year in auto. This will be the first major negotiations since the contract negotiated after the Obama-UAW-Wall St. bailout of the industry in 2009. That bailout cut starting wages in half, eliminated pensions for new hires and created a second tier of health care.
Ford did not declare bankruptcy in 2009, and will likely be the target company this year. Ford has gone from 36,000 workers in 2011 to 54,000 today, surpassing GM. 17,000 Ford workers are second tier. Huge profits allowed Ford to invest over $8 billion in plant improvements since 2011, to create even higher productivity from a growing low-wage workforce. And this doesn’t include the parts-supplier plants, a third and fourth tier, at 70 percent of assembly plant wages.
The Chicago Ford Assembly plant has over 2300 workers, an increase of 60 percent since the 2009 economic collapse. Two-thirds of these workers are at entry level wages, making under $15 an hour. with a cap of $19 an hour. First-tier workers make about $28 an hour. Work is coming back to U.S. Ford factories due to high productivity and cheap wages in the US.
Many of the delegates at the Special Bargaining Convention in Detroit last March were angry, and the loudest cheers came at any mention of a strike. Senior workers haven’t had a wage increase in almost 10 years, and young workers are tired of making half-pay. One young worker said, “90 percent of the workers in my plant are second-tier…We are exposed to dangerous chemicals [which she rattled off] and health and safety violations. We all need equal pay and healthcare.”
Another delegate said, “My local marched for Mike Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York City. The fight against racism on and off the job must be at the heart of who we are.” Delegates cheered as earlier that morning, the local news released video tape of Floyd Dent, a Black Ford worker with 37 years seniority, being beaten by racist Inkster police (a Ferguson-style suburb of Detroit).
We work in the unions to fight for the political leadership of the workers, to break them away from the dead-end treadmill of reformism and the Democratic Party. We have been at it for a long time in the UAW, and even though progress is slow, the workers continue to encourage us.